moon bears

Robinson was working for the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW ) in Hong Kong when she received a call from a journalist friend in 1993. "My God, I’ve just been to one of these horrendous bear farms," she recalls him saying. "Jill, you have to go." Robinson -- a British-born animal lover whose dreams of veterinary school were dashed when she failed chemistry and physics -- knew nothing about moon bears (also called Asiatic black bears) and little about bile farming. But she traveled to China’s Guangdong Province and tagged along on a farm tour, sanitized for tourists. She watched as the farmers showed off a pit containing about 20 breeding bears and encouraged visitors to tease the hungry creatures by dangling apples from a fishing line.